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Monday, 1 February 2016

PhoneChat

It is quite entertaining to listen in when my daughter (who's not the woman in the photo above) gets a scam telephone call. She sets herself two targets:

To keep the scammer on the line as long as possible to waste their time and money, and

To try to get the scammer's credit card or bank details.

So far she has failed on Target 2, but she does manage to keep some of them doggedly attempting to return to their scripts after she has led them up garden paths after wild geese and red herrings for a long time.

But the problem is that all this wastes her time too.

Chatterbots have been around since I was programming computers by punching little holes in rectangles of cardboard. The first was Weizenbaum's ELIZA psychiatrist. That mimicked a non-directive therapist. It was completely brainless, but so strong is the human impulse to ascribe active agency to anything that talks to us, it was both interesting and fairly convincing to have a typed conversation with.

And these days chatterbots are much more sophisticated. With near real-time speech recognition, voice synthesis that sounds like a proper human, and recursive sentence writers that never make a grammatical mistake, they can just about hold a real 'phone conversation. Just listen to the second recording here - the appropriate laughter from the robot is stunning.

So how about a 'phone app that you tap when you get a scam call? This app takes over the conversation, wasting the scammer's time for as long as possible and allowing you to get on with your life.

But it needn't end there. The app could transcribe the entire scam conversation and upload it. This would automatically compile a reference collection of scammer's scripts that anyone could google while they had someone on the line that they were suspicious of. Also the app could evolve: conversational gambits that led to longer calls could be strengthened and new weights could be incorporated in upgrades so the app would get better and better at hanging the hapless scammer on the line. Finally, the app could take the record of the things that the scammers themselves say and add variations on that to its repertoire of responses.

Already there are online lists of source numbers for scammers (though most disguise their origins, of course). When the app found that your 'phone's account was coming to the end of the month and that you had unused free minutes it could dial up those scammer numbers at three in the morning and see how many crook's credit card and bank details it could gather and post online...